Large product development projects face the daunting challenge of efficiently meeting continuously increasing and evolving system design requirements, such as legislative/regulatory requirements, customer requirements, knowledgebase requirements and so on. Generally, meeting these requirements can be expensive and can significantly increase development time. Typically, these requirements are verified periodically to comply with the initial intent of a product development process and to improve safety and quality of designs.
Further, documented requirements may not always be expressive enough to convey exact intent of a system designer and this may make the requirements verification very expensive and time consuming. For example, a requirement may state “required length of a conduit shall be minimum”. However, the term “minimum” may not be defined enough to perform the requirement verification. Generally, such verification of requirements involves understanding the requirements, manually identifying the associated components, extracting required data from various data sources and manually analyzing the compliance criteria using the extracted data.
Manually tracing the components and requirements associated with the components can be very difficult and time consuming, as there can be a large number of components which go through continuous design changes during the product development phase. Also, such verification of requirements for compliance can be typically an unavoidable obligation, mandated by government agencies and safety requirements. Moreover, the current manual verification process may often result in human error. Thus, current solutions fail to address easy access to all requirements information and easier verification for compliance to these requirements.